Four MFs Playin' Tunes isn't as lame and laboured as its title would suggest, but it's far too content to sit pretty on a post-bop pedestal that everyone else abandoned quite a while ago.

Four MFs Playin' Tunes

Now, pardon my French, but there’s actually something really amusing about the word “motherfucker”. It gives us more than cheeky teenage kicks. It tends to hit the mark regardless of its grammatical context. The more aggressive end of the hip-hop spectrum uses it as a grunted adjective. When Prince used it, it was lascivious and raunchy. And, before all that, it was used by George Clinton in a more tame formation – the playfully psychedelic euphemism that was the word “motherfunker”. For Branford Marsalis, however, it seems to be a term of endearment for his quartet (pianist Joey Calderazzo, Eric Revis on bass, and new boy Justin Faulkner on drums). But while this sounds rather sweet, one might also say that Marsalis was trying a teeny tiny bit too hard to sound controversial. After all, this quartet is a uncontroversial set-up playing rather conventional jazz in a post-bop vain, so doesn’t it seem a bit, well, laboured? Perhaps it would have been better to call it Four Bookish Jazz Guys Wearin’ Jumpers, or Four Cool Jazz Dads Drivin’ Safely, or something. Yeah, that’s what we’ll call it.

Without accounting for his celebrity play dates with Sting, Four Dutiful Husbands Buyin’ Groceries is Branford Marsalis’s 24th album. It consists of seven looping original pieces of pretty bog-standard post-bop and two covers (Monk’s “Teo” and Robin, Chase, and Whiting’s “My Ideal”). And by “bog-standard”, I mean that it gets stuck in its own stinky, self-indulgent funk. It’s the same old studious conservatism that we know and loathe -- it stands its ground and doesn't look outside of the sadly deforested jazz jungle for inspiration. Indeed, on Four Young Lions Roarin’ Meekly, Branford Marsalis makes absolutely no attempt to rethink – let alone move beyond – the great innovators of the jazz world post-bebop. Make no mistake, it’s not a bad record by any means, and the Quartet are all good individual musicians. But when they play together, there just isn’t any fire. Nothing interesting happens.

Now, we can’t blame Marsalis or the other three-quarters of the quartet for the troubles of the jazz end of the music industry. Dwindling audiences since the 1980s and the collapse of record-buying have forced labels and artists into making some poor choices. But, here, Marsalis commits two of the numerous sins of contemporary jazz. First, this record is too long. At nine tracks and more than 66 minutes, it seems overloaded, like it wants to baffle you with its numerous, but ultimately quite empty, ideas. Second, the quantity-over-quality policy means that Marsalis opts to show off those ideas in a way that sacrifices any authentic exploration of themes or moods. This basically reduces the Quartet to being a jam band. They end up just being four guys. In a studio. Playing tunes. And somehow we’re supposed to swallow all their twists and turns and suave use of apostrophes as if they’re a sort of high-minded musical dialogue.

There are some shrewd exotic touches on opener “The Mighty Sword”. The interplay between Marsalis and Calderazzo, who spends the entire track tizzying over the high-notes, is really joyful, while bass and drums provide us with a shuffling, swinging backbone. But didn’t we already hear that on Sonny Rollins’s take on “St Thomas”? It doesn’t bring much more to the table. Both “Whiplash” and “Endymion” take some frenetic twists and turns. On the former, Marsalis dictates a shifting mood – tentative, kinda worrying, to a shuddering sprained drum solo conclusion. On the latter, we start off with a strange, soulful introduction, with Marsalis and Calderazzo playing an off-centre melody that quickly turns into something rather rattling and confusing. Revis gets his say about half way through, and it all comes crashing down at the end.

Basically, Four Vacationing Grad Students Wearin’ Fannypacks, in the swooning melancholia of “As Summer Into Autumn Slips”, and on the first half of “Maestra”, we get some good old fashioned contemplative ballads thrown in for good measure. However, there’s not very much to set anything on here apart from everything else that’s just like it that you’ve probably heard before. It’s not that it’s bland or boring, it’s just that the same sort of musicians have been putting out the same sort of records for the best part of 20 years. Where some of their peers have explored the stranger outreaches of afro-tech-jazz, or shown us just how darned dialectically integrated jazz and hip-hop are, Branford Marsalis and his crew have firmly entrenched themselves in a past long gone. And on this evidence, they ain’t budging.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.